IN 1878, Johns Hopkins University’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, founded the Johns Hopkins Publication Agency to publish important material for scholars and the public outside of the academy. “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures,” said Gilman, “but far and wide.” Gilman was onto something: Nearly one hundred fifty years later, Johns Hopkins University Press—the oldest continuously operating university press in the United States—is just one of over 120 American university presses striving to enlighten readers everywhere. But the conglomeration of the publishing industry and evolving reader habits have significantly changed the U.S. commercial book economy over the past few decades, and university presses now serve even broader roles than what Gilman envisioned—and arguably more indispensable ones. Besides offering regional expertise and deep dives into academic and niche subjects, university presses provide readers with the kind of innovative voices and literary forms that commercial operations can’t always justify publishing because of their bottom line. They also help authors build lifelong careers in a field fraught with financial and professional challenges. That mission serves writers, readers, and the wider world.
Despite their name, university presses don’t just publish class textbooks or arcane scholarship in stuffy tones. They are book publishers like any other, though a larger vision or mission drives them in place of the pressures of living and dying by profit margins. Some university presses specialize in local history and Indigenous culture. Some focus on the American West, others on the American South. a testament to the durability and consistency of university presses. Many university presses also publish memoirs, essay collections, poetry, and short stories whose forms may be too experimental or unconventional for commercial publishers to touch, like the graphic essays in Dustin Parsons’s collection (University of Georgia Press, 2018) or Sorayya Khan’s sweeping memoir , published in 2022 by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press.
